<p>“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs.<br />
GNU Mes helped to reduce the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0 by a factor ten from ~250 to ~25 MiB.<br />
Janneke talks about working on GNU Mes, its community, NGI Zero funding and calls for a fifth freedom: Freedom Four. The freedom to build a program totally from source.<br />
Links:<br />
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/">GNU Mes website</a><br />
<a href="https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes/">GNU Mes NGI Zero project page</a><br />
<a href="https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-RISCV/">GNU Mes RISC-V NGI Zero project page</a><br />
<a href="https://lilypond.org">GNU Lilypond</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms">Four freedoms of Free Software</a><br />
<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358198.358210">Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust</a><br />
DOE040 <a href="https://doe040.nl">the democratic school in Eindhoven</a><br />
<br />
Other projects mentioned:<br />
<a href="https://github.com/oriansj/stage0">Stage0</a><br />
<a href="https:/guix.gnu.org">Guix</a><br />
<a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gash">Gash</a><br />
<a href="https://github.com/ajherchenroder/live-bootstrap-with-lfs">live bootstrap with lfs</a><br />
<br />
Blog posts on GNU Mes:<br />
Janneke and Ludovic Courtès - April 26, 2023 <a href="https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/">The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down</a><br />
Janneke — June 15, 2020 <a href="https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25/">Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%</a><br />
Janneke - October 8, 2019 <a href="https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/">Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by 50%</a></p>
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